Ten-year-old Sandy's childhood ends when his mother sells him to a farmer who half-starves and beats him.
Sandy's life as a 'bonder' is unbearable. He runs away home but his mother makes him return- to another beating.
So he runs away for good, away from the farm and from home.
Alone on the road, penniless, Sandy is lucky to find friends: Spot and Patch, two drover's dogs, who are making their way home all by themselves.
With no idea where they are going, Sandy joins them, following them across Scotland, through a wild landscape of loch and mountain, to the Hebridean island of Mull in the West.
When the dogs lead him to their croft, Sandy's deepest wish seems to have come true: he, too, has found a loving home.
He is happier at Lachlan's croft than he thought he could be, until someone spitefully tells him that he is not liked or wanted there at all. Unwelcome, he takes to the road again. But without his four-legged friends.
Will he go through his whole life friendless and lonely?
Susan Price is an acclaimed writer of books for the young. She has won the Carnegie medal and the Guardian Fiction prize and her books have been translated into many languages.
About the Author: About ten years before she started writing this book, Susan Price came across a quote, in Haldane's Drove Roads of Scotland, about drove dogs walking home by themselves at the end of a drove.
Only much later did she learn about 'bondagers' or bonded labourers, from her Scottish partner. The two bits of information came together and inspired this book, the first book by this award-winning author to be self-published without having been previously published elsewhere.
In researching the book, Price and her partner followed the drove road to Mull. Thankfully, their transport and accommodation was rather better than they would have had as early 19th Century drovers.
Susan Price won the prestigious Carnegie Medal for The Ghost Drum, the first in her Ghost World Sequence.
She won The Guardian Fiction prize for The Sterkarm Handshake.
